RAID Hard Disk not showing full capacity within XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter John-Scott Theron
  • Start date Start date
J

John-Scott Theron

I have two 120gb Western Digital IDE Hard Disks in RAID0.

Under the RAID array management software that comes up at
boot it is displayed as 240gb.

Under windows it is displayed as 223gb. I had originally
believed this was due to system restore reserving 12% of
the drive. However i disabled system restore the other
day and it still displays 223gb.

I do not believe this issue is the same as Windows XP
Does Not Recognize All Available Disk Space
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-
us;316505

This is because I do have some windows programs that are
able to read the full size of the disk. For example PC
Wizard 2004 (www.cpuid.com). Maybe the space is still
reserved somehow and that system restore has not released
it?

Please help!
 
Hi John-Scott

You are not missing any space, although the drive manufacturer could be
clearer.

In XP, open My Computer, select the appropriate drive and right-click,
select properties... beside 'capacity' you will see the total number of
bytes on your disk and to the right the
number of Gigabytes.

For example, on my 120 Gb SATA drive I have 120,023,252,992 bytes... which
is
also listed in disk properties as a capacity of 111 Gb.

The Hard Drive manufacturer refers to the 'bytes' total in my case as
120 Gb... and, in purely decimal terms, it is - 120,000,000,000 bytes.

The 111 Gb is what the operating system (XP) 'sees'... because the OS
calculates
1024 bytes as 1 Kb, 1024 Kb as 1 Mb, and 1024 MB as 1 Gb.....

so in my case 120023252992 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 (that's bytes => Kilobytes
=>
Megabytes => Gigabytes) is 111 Gigabytes as far as the computer is
concerned.

Neither calculation of the disk size is 'wrong' ...... they are equivalent.

In your case the combined drive capacity - approx 240,046,505,984 bytes -
will be
referred to by the computer as 223.56 Gb. (The drive capacity may only show
the first 3 digits.)

NB The RAID management software may simply be reporting the 240,000,000,000
bytes as "240gb" hence the discrepancy there.

Hope that helps
Pete
 
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